I was two years old when I fell out of a car on the freeway. The car was doing about sixty. I don’t remember any of it. What I have are the photographs: a smiling boy covered in road rash.
The bike crash I remember. I was riding without a shirt, and I came very close to rubbing my nipples off on the asphalt. I have been laughing about that one for years.
Laughing has served me well with physical pain.
It does nothing for heartbreak.
That is a different animal altogether, and it’s the one I want to write about, because what we do with it decides a good deal about the rest of our lives, and about the people standing near us while we decide.
Wires and transformers
Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and writer, offers an image I can’t improve on. Most of us, he says, are like electric wires: what comes in is what goes out. Someone calls us a name, and we call them a name back. A transformer, the grey box on a utility pole, does something different. Dangerous current goes in, and something useful comes out. His line for the stakes is blunt: “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”
Rohr builds his image on his faith. You don’t need a faith to see the principle.
Psychologists have studied one version of this: displaced aggression. When we can’t strike back at the source of our hurt, we hand it to whoever is nearby. A meta-analysis of the experiments found the effect reliable. In one study of 210 supervisors, their employees, and the employees’ families, being abused at work was followed by more undermining at home. The boss hurts the employee, the employee hurts the family, and the pain keeps finding the next person down the line.
Holding it in doesn’t count as transforming it. The habit of keeping a straight face, which researchers call suppression, has not done well in the studies. People who habitually suppress report more negative emotion and worse relationships, and in one experiment, suppression raised the blood pressure of the person sitting across the table. The wire can stay silent and still pass the current.
What sport knows
I know the pain of exertion well, and in sport I go looking for it. The burn at the end of a hard piece doesn’t frighten me. I read it as information: I’m near the limit of what my body can do, and the limit is where it learns to do more. I choose that pain. I don’t choose the other kind, so I want to be careful here. This is an analogy, not a proof. But it has taught me something.
Coaches carry a formula: stress plus rest equals growth. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness build Peak Performance around it, and it descends from Hans Selye’s work on how a body responds to stress. It moves through alarm, adaptation and, if the stress never lets up, exhaustion. The muscle doesn’t grow during the workout. It grows in the recovery, provided the load was real and the rest was too. Skip the stress and nothing changes. Skip the rest and you don’t get stronger, you get hurt.
A Heidelberg meta-analysis found that athletes tend to tolerate more experimentally induced pain. Whether they begin to feel it at the same point is less clear. What looks learned is the capacity to stay with it, though the researchers couldn’t say whether training makes people tolerant or tolerant people become athletes.
What carries over to the pain we didn’t choose isn’t the seeking. It’s the skills: staying with a hard sensation without panic, reading what it’s telling you, and knowing the difference between sore and injured. Every athlete learns that difference, and so, I think, does anyone who gets through a loss.
The empty house
The emotional pain of my first marriage ending has never fully left me. It changed form over the years into something I can carry. I remember the empty house, and sitting in it. It wasn’t only that a family was breaking up. It was the loss of a future that was never going to happen.
There’s a reason we use the word hurt for both kinds. In a brain-imaging study, people who had recently been through an unwanted breakup looked at a photograph of their ex, and regions that support the physical sensation of pain became active. The interpretation is disputed, and I hold it loosely, but it matches the language we’ve always used.
I understand now that the size of that pain probably wasn’t only about that house. Part of it was a long overdue reckoning with the pain I felt as a boy when my own family broke up.
During my first divorce I was broken in a way I had never been broken before. It was pain, love and loss, all fighting for the stage. I acted out. I held anger toward my ex for years. I was justified, but not for as long as I held it. Acting out was one way of passing the pain on. Holding the anger for years was another way of keeping the current running.
Gradually I let the anger go, and what emerged was something larger: a new kind of love and friendship with my ex, one we would not have found without the rupture. I wouldn’t call the rupture a gift. Eighteen years later, I still don’t fully comprehend what grew after it.
Things are good now. It took a long time, and it took understanding the pain from every side.
Befriend it, then give it a dose
What helped was learning to befriend the pain, to understand it. I have an analytical mind, and pain is rarely rational, so understanding only took me so far. Mostly it was time, and putting my energy somewhere else.
I used to joke with the people I worked with that we all carry a certain amount of pain, and the only question is where it shows up. Fix the back and it moves to the knee. I was kidding, mostly. The joke has a serious edge. A life without pain isn’t possible, so the choice isn’t whether to have it. The choice is what to do when it comes. Numbing it, with drink, work, noise or silence, doesn’t remove it. In my experience it postpones the meeting, and the wait doesn’t make the meeting easier.
Psychologists call the habit experiential avoidance. In the work behind a standard measure of it, people who avoid more tend to report more depression, anxiety and trauma symptoms, and a lower quality of life. That is correlation, and I’d rather say so. The thought-suppression experiments are more direct: across thirty-one studies, trying not to think about something made the thought come back stronger afterward.
Turning my energy elsewhere is different from numbing, as long as the pain still gets its turn. Numbing is when it never does.
Grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut describe something like this as oscillation. A grieving person at times faces the loss and at other times turns toward the rest of life, and the respite is part of coping well, not a failure of it. Take pain in doses. I’ve found that when I don’t give pain my total attention, it leaves faster. The research on attention and pain is mixed, and I won’t pretend it settles the matter. It matches what I’ve seen.
Don’t let it become who you are
Pain is complex, and it’s a motherfucker. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Just don’t let it become all that you are. Don’t let it become your identity or your purpose. In my experience, your relationship with pain shapes how much it takes from you.
Researchers have a way of measuring this. The Centrality of Event Scale asks how much a painful event has become a reference point for who you are and how you read the rest of your life. In a sample of 707 undergraduates, higher centrality went along with more PTSD symptoms and more depression. That is correlation, so we can’t say which comes first. A later study of more than two thousand adults in their sixties found something worth noticing: the centrality of a person’s most positive event wasn’t linked to distress, while the centrality of their worst event was.
The chronic pain research points the same way. A meta-analysis of twenty-four studies and over six thousand people found that greater acceptance of pain went along with less pain-related disability. Acceptance here doesn’t mean liking it or giving up. It means not spending your life fighting it. An earlier study found that acceptance was linked to better functioning even after accounting for how intense the pain was. Those are studies of chronic pain, and heartbreak is something else, so I offer them as a pattern, not a proof.
How much, and not alone
I’m not advocating pain. I’m not telling anyone to go looking for heartbreak. The research that comes closest to defending hardship is careful about it: a national study found that people with some adversity in their past did better than people with a great deal, and also better than people with none. It can’t prove cause, and the word that matters is moderation.
It also matters what kind of attention we give it. Researchers on post-traumatic growth find that deliberate, reflective thinking about a hard event, soon after it happens, is associated with growth, while looping, intrusive rumination isn’t reliably. That’s the difference between working a wound and being worked by it. It’s a skill, which means it improves with practice and plateaus along the way. I notice progress in how I respond when the pain returns, and in what I stop asking other people to carry.
Taking pain head on doesn’t mean taking it all at once, or taking it alone. A good coach doesn’t send an athlete to the edge without a plan, a warm-up and a day off. For emotional pain, support might come from a friend or therapist. Sometimes I also need an honest hour alone in a chair. And pain that has become the whole of someone’s life deserves a professional, which no essay, mine included, can replace.
What leaves with us
The same choice runs at a larger scale. Much of the world’s pain is passed along person to person in just this way. Boss to employee to family is the chain at the size of a household, and I don’t need to tell you what it looks like at the size of a country. Every person who transforms instead of transmits is a place where the chain stops. That doesn’t fix the world, and structural harms need structural responses. But it’s where I know how to begin.
I don’t think the wound itself is a gift. Some pain leaves lasting damage, and nobody owes it gratitude. Pain can break us open, and what we do in the opening decides what gets passed on. I don’t have to be grateful for what hurt me. I held my anger longer than it was justified, and I want to be more careful now about what I hand to the next person.
Pain will come. What leaves with you is the choice.